Winter
by the ramblin rose
Summary: Caryl. Oneshot. "Yes, the winter of their lives had been long and harsh. But to every winter, a spring must come."


**AN: This is just a one shot that I wanted to write. I'm not even really sure what to say about it other than it was something that I thought I needed to write. **

**I might offer you a tissue warning, just in case you might need it. **

**I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think! **

111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

They learned to fear the winter. Winters were long and harsh and seemed to last forever.

He felt like his old bones creaked and groaned like tree branches heavily coated with ice, and they moved just as stiffly when he tried to stir them as when the wind tried to rouse those very same branches to sway.

It was the dead of winter. The time when there was nothing but death and quiet and rest…as far as the eye could see in any direction. Except his eyes, these days, couldn't see too far at any rate.

And it didn't matter if around him the birds sang songs of spring or not, because it was a spring that he couldn't see, and they were songs that he couldn't hear.

Whether the winter was inside him or without, it was the dead of winter and he knew it was his last. The spring this year would see him in a different place…a better place…a place he longed to be. And he was anxious, if for nothing else, to get his trip underway.

When the morning came, far too cheerful for the frozen season, he pulled himself up out the bed. And he followed, just the same as he had every morning for as long as his ever shortening memory allowed him to recall, added just one stick to the fire, drank bitter coffee black, and polished off the heel of bread left over from the meal before.

Then he dressed in the dirty and worn clothes that were torn now, shaggier than they'd been when she had cared for them with hands that she pretended didn't ache from the stitching, and donned boots that were dirty and scuffed and well-worn…the shoes reflecting the miles their wearer had walked in them.

_Oh, can't you see that snow white dove;_

_She flies from pine to pine…_

They mated for life. Doves and Dixons.

It was, perhaps, the only thing that he'd ever had in common with the bird that was meant to symbolize so many beautiful things.

Because, now especially, he was anything but beautiful. It had been a long time since he'd seen his own reflection…years, maybe even decades, it was hard to mark the passage of time in anything besides the children that he saw growing around him in the community in which they lived…but he'd never needed to know what he looked like, at least not really.

Neither glass nor ice had never accurately reflected a person anway.

He'd always been content to know what he looked like reflected back in her eyes. That had been, after all, the only part of him that had ever mattered when it all came down to it. The part of him that she saw…the part she didn't even realize that she'd brought to life.

Maybe she had seen the resemblance, if there was any, between doves and Dixons. Because if no one else had ever seen it, had ever _really_ seen it, she'd seen some kind of beauty in him.

And in her?

In her he'd seen the most beautiful thing that ever there was to see.

_Just mourning for her own true love_

_The way I mourn for mine._

She'd been so beautiful. She'd been, for his eyes, the most welcomed sight that ever the world had held. Even as the winter had come upon them…the winter inside them from which the younger people of the community they joined couldn't feel the cold…she had been his warmth.

He had sworn to her once that he'd lost her too many times. He'd sworn to her that he would never lose her again. He'd sworn that nothing could take her from him.

And he'd truly believed that nothing could, because he was convinced that he would leave the world before she did. He didn't want to live in a world that was as cold as he knew it would be without her.

They travelled so far together. They trudged so many miles, each of them taking turns dragging the other along. And, together, they watched years roll by them one day at a time…each season giving way unto the next.

Their lives were long. Their lives had been much longer than lives these days seemed to have any right being. But still, their time was so short. Happiness never lasts long enough, and in the cold, the flame flickers and dies before you're ready to relinquish the warmth its light brings.

He made it out to the place to sit on the wooden bench that someone had fashioned and placed there for him. He eased aching bones gently down and settled with a sigh into his position. He stretched a hand out, fingers swollen from arthritis and sore to the touch, and he embraced, like he always did, the wooden arm of the cross that he'd rubbed smooth with the sacrifice of his fingertips.

_Look down, look down that long, lonesome road;_

_Hang down your head and cry._

In the end, it hadn't been the things they'd dreaded that had brought about the unwelcome guest of death to knock at their door. It hadn't been from heartache, which she'd surely known enough of in her life, that she had left him. It hadn't been from animated death itself in the form of the Walkers, almost extinct now and almost the things of dark fairy tales told to frighten children into behaving. It hadn't been the cruel hand of some ruthless person whose black soul shouldn't have been left to roam the Earth.

In the end it had simply been the touch of time…the touch that made her eyes grow dim and softened her throughout the years. It had simply been time that had taken her from him.

The same forever that they promised to spend together had pulled apart their hold on one another. It had simply been the years they promised each other, the hours, the minutes. The ticking by of all their promises of eternity…every promise kept…had been what slipped in, like winter wind through the cracks in the boards, and taken her from him.

It had been the coldest day of the year, right in the middle of July, when he'd held her hand in his and wet her lips for the last time with his own.

And everything inside him then had very nearly frozen solid with the sudden and suffocating loss of all the warmth in the world.

_The best of friends are sure to part,_

_So why not you and I?_

It had been so long since he'd seen her face. Yet, no matter how much his memory faded for everything else he'd known in his life, no matter how many names, faces, places, and moments in time that he forgot…he could remember her face in all its many phases as perfectly as if she were only inches in front of him.

He could see her smiling at him, even now.

And even though he couldn't hear too well the voices of those who came to visit him and tried to talk to him about life and the past…about all the things that he'd known and seen. Even though he was almost deaf to everything they asked and said…he could hear her voice, still tinkling with the happiness that she'd known in later years, still heavy with the teasing tone that she'd employed nearly every day he'd known her.

_Hurry up, Dixon…you're slowing us down! Are you going to make me wait forever? Come along…it's almost nighttime…we have to get everything ready…the winter is coming. _

Their whole lives they'd prepared, from one year to the next, for the winter. But they'd never prepared, not entirely, for the greatest winter of all. The one that was upon him now and left his body trembling and shivering nearly all the time without her beside him to keep him safe and warm.

When he felt his hours were up, so many of them having dragged on far longer than he'd wanted them to, and night was finally showing signs of her approach, he pushed himself to his feet and leaned to touch the worn and weathered wood once more. He touched it for the last time, content with the feeling of hope that burned in his soul, the first warmth he'd felt for so very long.

"Tonight," he said, knowing she would hear him. She'd always said that she could hear him, even while she slept. "I never slept good without'cha…an' I know you ain't restin' without me. And I'm old and I'm slow…know you gonna have somethin' ta say about it…gonna be good to hear ya say it…"

He brushed at his eye, the tear there now not the cousin of the ones that had fallen every day since the day he'd set the cross, but rather the first sign of melting. The first sign of the coming spring and the new awakening…so long coming now.

"Winter, she's cold this year," he said, swallowing against the hard lump in his throat. "She's cold and she's long and I'm pretty damn tired now. But tonight we both gonna sleep sound…'cause I'm comin' to keep you warm. I done kept you waitin' far too long. I been waitin' too long myself. But you just wait a few more hours and have them arms ready for me. The thaw's comin' and so am I."

Yes, the winter of their lives had been long and harsh.

But to every winter, a spring must come.

111111111111111111111111111111111111111

**AN: The lines of poetry come from the folk song "George Collins" and are not mine. **


End file.
